The House of Others

Called “a perfect story” by Nobel Prize-winning poet Eugenio Montale, The House of Others (Casa d’altri) is the title story in the best-known work by twentieth-century Italian author Ezio Comparoni, writing under the name Silvio d’Arzo, one of his numerous pseudonyms. In a desolate mountain village an old woman visits the parish priest, ostensibly to ask about dissolving a marriage. Gradually, as she probes for information on “special cases”–cases in which what is obviously wrong can also be irrefutably right–it becomes clear her true question is whether or not she might take her own life. The question is metaphysical, involving not only the woman’s life but the priest’s; and to it he has no answer.

Collected here with the short stories “Elegy for Signora Nodier,” “The Old Couple,” “A Moment of This Sort,” and “Our Monday, A Preface,” The House of Others is among the scant translations in English of this highly acclaimed Italian author.